Swine Unit

This semester I am taking Animal Science 150 and 151. One is the lab and one is the lecture, but I don’t remember which is which. Anywho, I clearly know whatever I do with my life for my career should be with animals because when I am around animals I’m the most comfortable and I just know what to do. Wish I could say the same about babies and children….hahaha! We went to the Swine Unit to study the behavior of the baby pigs when taken away from their mother and also to see how the sow would react. We also used a maze to test how baby pigs felt about their siblings, such as if you had to pick one thing to be most essential to the care of the baby pigs would it be the presence of their mother, presence of their siblings or warmth. We only tested for presence of siblings though because we were just getting an idea of how the experiment works. We also pick the biggest baby from 3 litters and put them in a pen and observed who would assert their dominance. Not to brag our anything, but our baby asserted himself and was the most dominant 🙂 Here are a few pictures from the Swine Unit, hope you enjoy!

Don’t let this little guy fool you, once removed from the pen with his mother and siblings he screamed like his life depended on it! (sorry the pic quality isn’t great, I forgot my camera and had to use my phone 😦 )

Mackenzie is an old friend from cheerleading and coincidentally we ended up in the same class!

I like this one because you can see how big the sows are! When you walk up to the pens all the little babies run to the other side to hide from you so you have to have one person on each side and then scoop them up quick when they come at you. And you can’t be afraid of the ear-splitting scream that comes from the more dominant ones.

Isn’t he just the cutest!

These look like Babe! Does anyone remember that movie?

Still in store for this semester is the Swine unit again, the small ruminant unit (sheeps and goats for those that don’t know), Beef unit, Dairy unit and the Equine unit! Of course I’ll be posting on those as they come up!